


please don't go

by PlacentaMilk



Series: please break my heart [1]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: M/M, Sad, Short, and you get sad! And you!!! get sad!!!, anyway this is sad, hi first of all, im depressed, no happy times, not edited, read if want sad, sue me, you get sad, you want sad?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-21
Updated: 2017-10-21
Packaged: 2019-01-20 14:41:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,425
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12434943
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PlacentaMilk/pseuds/PlacentaMilk
Summary: In one universe: a newly started friendship comes to an end.





	please don't go

His head feels thick with sleep and his limbs feel heavy when he finally wakes up. Pain courses through his chest, his arms, but he can't feel his legs.

He opens his mouth to speak but it feels like his throat is clogged with cotton, his tongue dry and thick in his mouth. He takes a moment, trying to conjure up saliva to help get rid of the dryness, of the cotton, and then he speaks. "Pidge…" Is the first name that comes to his mind. "Pidge… You there?" He asks, trying to will his heavy eyelids to open. "Hunk? Allura?" He calls out, and when his eyes finally open, he's staring straight up at the ceiling, a dark metal washed in purple light.

He's so tired of purple.

"Anybody…?" He tilts his head to the side, seeing nothing on the ground next to him besides his broken bayard. Can the bayards even break? Should they be able to?

It hurts to tilt his head the other way, to the left, but he decides it's worth it when he finally sees something familiar other than the purple lights. "Keith," he calls out to the black paladin, face down on the floor.

The other doesn't move, doesn't speak.

"Keith," he calls again, wanting to get up and walk over there but finding that he can't bring himself to sit up. "Keith, buddy. I need you, you gotta wake up," he says, hopefully loud enough for the raven to wake up.

He doesn't.

Lance decides to turn his gaze down to his legs that he can't feel, and is filled with relief when both are still there, intact. He lays there for a minute, trying to figure out what he can do, what to worry about, what not to worry about. His legs are something he should worry about, but he won't, because he can't figure out what's wrong or what he can do to fix it. The radio wave that links all the paladins together through their helmets is dead, so he wants to worry about that, wants to worry about where his teammates are and why they can't hear him, but he can't do anything to find out, or fix it.

Keith is really the only thing he can focus on.

He takes another couple of minutes, clearing his head of the fog that tries to invade it, and then uses what feels like all of his strength to flip over onto his stomach, facing Keith. It takes a while to drag himself over to the raven, stopping to rest his painfully tired arms, and then continuing to push himself along the floor that his hands mostly slide on.

"Keith," he says when he's finally close enough, right hand reaching out to shake the black paladin's shoulder. "Keith, this isn't the time to be taking naps." His fingers reach out to brush away the thick black parts of hair that's fallen in the others face, eyes focusing on the paladin's back to see if his back will rise and fall with the breaths he's supposed to be taking. But he more so hears it before he sees it, there's a deep rumble in Keith's chest as he inhales, a wheeze as he exhales.

Good, his shaking hands can calm a bit now. He presses a hidden button on the side of his helmet to get rid of the glass barrier, and then he rests his head on the ground, tired. "Keith," he says again, eyes focusing on the others face. All he gets is a wheeze in response. "At least you aren't dead, buddy," he mumbles, mostly to himself.

"Allura, Coran," he says into his helmet, "literally anybody. Pidge? Hunk? Where are you guys?"

—

His hand is resting in Keith's hair, eyes closed and breath shallow when he hears it. It's brief, quiet, but the radio in his helmet crackles to life with "–trying to get–"

His eyes snap open and he looks around, despite knowing the voice came from his helmet. "Hello?" He calls out immediately. "Pidge? Was that you?"

He waits for the radio to emit someone's voice.

And waits.

And waits…

—

He's woken up to coughing, loud and ragged in his ears. He opens his eyes to find Keith, obviously, but he's awake.

"Holy quiznak, you're awake," he breathes, pushing himself up with one hand, the other one that was resting in Keith's hair now hovering over his back.

His heart drops into his stomach when red splatters onto the ground, onto Keith's hand that's covering his mouth. "Are you okay?" He asks, but Keith can't answer him, too busy coughing his lungs out. Eventually Keith turns, away from the brunette, and coughs up this big dark mass. Congealed blood. A lot of it.

Then he turns back and collapses on the ground, pieces of his hair sticking to his sweaty forehead, blood covering his mouth, his hands. "Jesus christ Keith," Lance mutters, busies his shaking hands by brushing the black hair out of Keith's closed eyes.

"What… What happened?" The other finally speaks, and its like drinking water, to hear his voice.

"I don't remember."

"Where's the others?"

"I don't know."

They lay in silence for a moment, Keith trying to fight the darkness that wants to cloud his head and drag him under, Lance looking at every single detail of Keith's face as if he'll never see the other's face again.

"I thought I heard somebody come over the radios, but it was just three words, and nothing came after it. I asked if they could hear me, and I waited, but nothing came." Lance refuses to lay his head down until he's sure that Keith won't wheeze out a lung and die, but man, it's hard to keep his head up.

"Why haven't you gone to find them?" Keith asks, quietly. Trying to focus on Lance's hand brushing through his hair instead of the pain that shoots through his chest each time he breathes in and wheezes out.

"And leave you here? Haha, no way mullet," Lance laughs, but it's lacking, even Keith can tell. Eventually Keith's eyes slit open and he gazes at the other, trying to read him like a book. It comes a minute later, when the half smile on Lances face slides off and the silence in the room starts to crush him. "I can't feel my legs… it was hard to drag myself all the way over here, how am I supposed to drag myself all over the ship?" It comes to him as he says it. That's right, they're in a Galra ship.

He doesn't know what he was expecting. Maybe a sharp glare from the other for being so stupid, maybe Keith telling him that he's stupid, maybe nothing at all, but instead Keith's hand reaches out and lands over Lance's other one, that's holding himself up.

That's when he finally allows himself to lie back down, except on his side this time, Keith's hand over his own, and his right one still buried in Keith's hair.

"You'll be fine," Keith coughs "you're Lance. Lancey Lance." His bloodied lips curl into a smile, his eyes crinkling, and Lance absolutely hates that they are where they are. Hates that Keith has blood on his lips, hates that he's probably lying in his blood that he coughed up not even ten minutes ago. Hates that he can hear the way Keith's lungs rumble as he inhales–more than likely from the blood that's somehow found it's way in there–and hates that he can't do anything to fix his wheeze that comes afterwards.

He's always been a crier. A _heart on my sleeve_ kind of guy. With how stressed he is over everything, the potential of dying here, the potential of Keith dying, the fact that the radio has been dead the entire time they've been here–which has probably been hours–does it really come as a surprise when Lance laughs, loud and big, eyes closing and scrunching to try and hide the tears that spill over anyway?

Keith just stares, unable to bring himself to laugh, but letting the small smile on his lips to stay. He watches the tears run down tan, dirty cheeks, and is about to open his mouth to say something, but Lance beats him to it. "Oh, Keith," he sighs, a chuckle making its way through the words. "I've never hated you. You know that, right?"

"Not really."

Lance's hands refuse to remove themselves from Keith, under the others hand and on top of his head. So instead Lance tilts his head to the right, to press his face into the black fabric that covers his arm to try to get rid of the tears.

"Do people usually tell their enemies stories about their home?" Keith asks, but it's not a question, and Lance laughs and laughs.

Keith smiles despite the pain and says "And about their families? About the _cool waters of Varadero beach?"_

–

"There's this other time where we were all riding our bikes down to the beach in the summer. It was hotter than it usually was, I swear that our tires could've melted to the asphalt. There were these girls hanging around, wearing tank tops and shorts, and I thought that I had to impress them. I don't know what I was thinking I was gonna do, but I sped up faster than my siblings and I started swerving side to side?"

"Did you fall?" Keith practically wheezes, eyes closed.

"Yeah. I fell. My bike slid out from underneath me and flew forward, meanwhile I crushed my hand between my body and the hot pavement. I got a sprained wrist and scraped skin for my efforts."

It's been another hour or two, maybe. Lance talks just to keep Keith awake, and the entire time he's been watching the raven deteriorate. Unable to do anything. It takes an effort for Keith to smile, just in the slightest, a quirk of the corner of his lips. Lance sees that, and he knows.

But he doesn't wanna know.

"Tell me about… a holiday… Christmas."

"I've told you all the memorable ones," Lance mummers, hand playing with Keith's hair that's damp from him sweating.

"Make one up. About all of us."

Lance smiles at that. A Christmas with his friends wouldn't be so bad. "Alright. We'd have to explain to Allura and Coran in greater detail about Christmas, and at the end we would ask if we could go to a planet that has trees. We would probably end up with a weird neon tree that bleeds crystals or something, it wouldn't be a normal tree."

"What color neon?" Keith asks, and the first color to come to his mind is red. Keith's jacket, his boots, his lion (even if he pilots black now). Keith's anger, Keith's compassion for knives, Keith's blood on the floor behind him.

He doesn't say red.

"I dont know, what color neon would it be? Maybe it'd be a color that we can't even see."

Keith's nose scrunches at that, and he says "Blue."

What a cliche. Lance doesn't find that he minds. "Okay, a blue neon tree that bleeds crystals. We would make ornaments, Hunk knows origami, and we would have a hard time tying them to the ends of the branches, since it's a big tree. We would collect items that we could put on the tree from planets we'd visit, and Pidge could mess around with wiring and get us some LEDs to put up."

"She'd make them rainbow."

"You think? I thought maybe she'd go with white... We would decorate the entire ship. Christmas decorations everywhere. We would play secret Santa, and on Christmas day we would open the presents we got for each other after dinner. Maybe we'd get an alien equivalent to ham and turkey for dinner."

Keith doesn't make a noise or a face like Lance expects him to, just the same rumble and wheeze softly sounding between the two of them.

"Are you listening?" Lance asks.

"Hm? Yes," Keith says a moment later, as if he was woken up from sleep. "I'm listening."

It doesn't help or calm him that Keith doesn't open his eyes, looking like he's about to fall asleep at any moment.

"What would you want for Christmas?" He asks, quietly.

"…I have everything I could need." Is the answer he gets in response.

–

A minute, ten, thirty minutes later, Keith falls asleep. Maybe another hour or three later, Lance finally realizes that the rumbling and soft wheezes have long since stopped.

His eyes open, adjusting to the dark light of the room again as opposed to the backs of his eyelids. He looks over at Keith, who's eyes are closed, bloodied mouth parted just as it was when Lance closed his eyes.

He listens. Waiting for the rumbling to come, waiting for the wheeze, but neither happen. He focuses on Keith's face, waiting to see a twitch or a flicker of something, anything, but nothing happens.

His eyes well up with tears before he's even gotten the chance to start processing what's happening. What's already happened. "Oh…" he mumbles, dejectedly. "Oh, Keith, I-" His voice cuts offs, tears somehow managing to block his throat too. Keith's hand is still on his own, limp, but not stiff. Not yet.

His trembling hand - the one he used to comb through Keith's hair not too long ago - reaches up to touch Keith's cheek. He can't…

"No, no, no, no, no," he mutters. "No, you're not supposed to die, what kind of… What the quiznak is that? You hated it when Shiro disappeared and now you're doing the same thing? Buddy…"

Eventually, fingers press to the side of the ravens throat, up into the skin under his jaw, down, down further, but no matter where he presses or how deep he digs his fingers, he can't find a pulse.

He cries. It's not something that can be covered with a laugh, or hidden when he looks away, it's ugly. An ugly cry that only seems to get worse with every sob that escapes his lips, every shake of his shoulders, every twitch of his trembling fingers. He cries until he's on the verge of sleep again, he cries himself out.

And right before he let's the darkness that's fallen over the two of them take him?

 

He hears the collapsed door behind him give away, and voices come in.

"-did it! Finally! Lance?! Keith?!"


End file.
